Disqus - Latest Comments for wyamarus

Re: Broadband for EVERYbody

wyamarus — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:13:16 -0000

What we really need for improved healthcare is not a high-speed backbone for the medico-insurance-chemical-banking cartel's bureaucratic paper shuffling, but a nationalized ( 'single-payer ', for the dogmatic libertarian capitalist) system with infrastructure on the Canadian model.

Local primary care clinics for emergency care and routine 'health maintenance' no more then 15 miles apart on a well marked national grid.
Staff these 24/7 with "real" doctors and trained support personnel. These can be an intrinsic part of a "Northern Lights" type scholarship-internship program for young medical students or those who would consider a rural practice.

Secondary hospitals for routine surgery and more intensive medical intervention. Perhaps on a 50-60 mile grid spacing with helicopter, light aircraft, and ambulance access for "real" emergency transport. Revive the old county hospitals. This puts them an hour away by car,which is the maximum reasonable distance for access to routine medical care.

Regional major hospitals that serve the most capital intensive medical procedures like nuclear medicine, magnetic resonance imaging, heart,brain,and other specialized surgical procedures. Put these every 150-200 miles so the access is still reasonable for the rare occasions one may have to use their services. Make every one a 'teaching' hospital,so we will have no shortage of trained personnel to keep the system functioning smoothly without the marathon workload present hospitals impose on their interns. Would you want a pilot who has been in the air for 90 hours? Why do we tolerate this in our medical system?

Smart Grid? Why not just use the power more intelligently? How much electricity is wasted by schools, shopping malls, government and commercial buildings just keeping the inside and outside lighting running all night, even when there are no users to be found. This doesn't require a more technologically sophisticated solution then a timer switch and the willingness to conserve.

The "Smart Grid" only fosters a more efficient (and profitable for the power cartel) use of the existing generating capability; it also promotes an Orwellian degree of intrusion into our daily lives, and that is without the 2-way 'communications & control' possible in a massively multiplexed data over power grid that is ubiquitous. More intelligent metering is not the same thing as more intelligent usage.

Broadband access would be nice, but who picks up the tab? Regular phone service post-Verizon has just gotten worse with every passing day since FairPoint seems to have abandoned the maintenance of the copper network. I have to live with dial-up, as the telco says I will see DSL or better sometime between "Hell freezing over..."and never. My dial-up connection 5 years ago used to top out at 38kbs, these days I get 28k on a good day, and 24k ordinarily;and it is unusable during the worst rainy spells as the line noise and the latency cause the carrier to drop every couple of minutes,and any website with java, flash, or activeX is just out of the question . A flat fee service for VOIP and data administered by a private entity, chartered by the state, and underwritten as part of the terms of being a public carrier in the state might work, but only if there was enough premium paying business users to make it profitable. The only other way is to make the state the telco,and have a state-owned municipal utility that operates at cost and is ubiquitous.

Re: How Elders Protect Themselves from Young’uns

wyamarus — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:41:38 -0000

The whole point of learning to do things manually is that one has to come to grips with the underlying principles. Software, or any other mechanical aid is too often used as a crutch by people who are entirely clueless about what they are trying to accomplish.

As an example, an architect's primary function is not to draft plans or engineering drawings, but to conceptualize the appropriate real-world solution for their client's requirements. The person who starts with a CAD program has missed the most important step of the process, analyzing the problem prepatory to coming up with a solution to it. An architect who has no practical experience in building is prone to designing unbuildable, unliveable structures that a first-year tradesman could tell him are unworkable. The tools available in the program itself force the user into regimented modes of design that contribute to the rising level of mediocrity in virtually every fabricated product today. The biggest problem, however, is the disconnect between the conceptualization of the design,and it's execution. Capitalism, and the profit/greed driven economy is also to blame for this, as technology is promoted as the answer for even non-existent problems because it has so long been promoted as 'more efficient'; when efficiency, like profitibility, is next to Godliness.

There is a real and distinct connection between the directness of a conceptual sketch at the moment of inspiration, and the time lag and additional level of abstraction of using a computer and software to do what could be done with pencil and paper. In software this is analogous to the artisan programmers who write elegant, compact machine language utilities written in assembly language or 'machine language' (the native binary code that the processor executes) and who work 'close to the metal', and the typical "commercial" bloatware that produces a 25GB word processor or spreadsheet written with a so-called 'modern' programming environment and pre-packaged modularized functions.

Re: GOP goes nuts on ACORN — and Fox eats it up

wyamarus — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:14:01 -0000

And the GOP hasn't taken advantage of gerrymandering, Federal election laws regarding the use of churches to promote individual candidates, and outright fraud and ballot tampering....

Re: A New Role for the Army

wyamarus — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:03:00 -0000

How is this any different then the overthrowing of elected governments and the propping up of unelected, unpopular dictatorships we've been doing since we invaded Cuba, the Philippines, and Hawa'ii many, many (roughly 100) years ago? Let's See ....Killing people and supporting terrorism overseas is the Humanitarian Mission of the All New Army? This is just the pretext to further militarize every aspect of life in the NuAmerika.

“As the nation continues into this era of uncertainty and persistent conflict, the lines separating war and peace, enemy and friend, have blurred,” writes Lt. Gen. William Caldwell in the manual’s preface.

This is true largely because we have made it so. The US in its entire history has never had a foreign policy that followed the ideas, let alone the ideals, expressed in the Constitution. We embarked on an Imperialist policy since the days of the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that all of the Western Hemisphere was 'Our' territory, and We could do with it as We saw fit. The histories of Cuba, Haiti, Panama,and Mexico are bathed in blood from US adventures in colonialism. So were the Philippines and Hawa'ii when our ambition extended over the Pacific. The only problem now, is that the 'natives' aren't 'ignorant savages' anymore, and they won't just roll over when a US gunboat (or bombers) show up to bring them 'back in line'.

Re: Palin Family Could Apply for Free Federal Health Care

wyamarus — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:55:40 -0000

Isn't this the same person who has reportedly referred to the Inuit as 'Arctic Arabs' when she called them 'whiners' about protesting the destruction of their homes, hunting, fishing, and environment by Big Oil intent on drilling, strip mining, or running a pipeline through the last habitable wild spaces on the planet? The same 'Big Oil' she supports pillaging ANWAR? I guess she and the First Dude are pretty well set, whether they get free medical care or not. I guess 'fishing' pays a lot better in Alaska then it does in the lower 48, especially when you are married to the Governor.